Indian cities are well past the point of collapse. Cars line the streets from bumper to exhaust pipe. On the ground, drains are full of rainwater. Local offices have 1,000 fires and very few hoses. Amidst the chaos of paperwork and the noise of ceiling fans, a quiet revolution is underway. Artificial intelligence (short for “thinking” machines) is creeping into urban governance.
It’s easy to dismiss this as just hype. But in a small number of cities, what was theoretical has now become reality. Seoul didn’t just experiment with AI. We institutionalized it. The company spent more than $150 million to install the technology at 38 locations across the city, from trash collection to safety services. It’s not about the pilot. It is an institutional determination. India is also leading the way in creative use cases. In Surat, a network of AI-enabled cameras has reduced street crime by nearly 25%.
AI integration starts with an overview
Replicating a model like Seoul will require greater focus on overlooked areas of AI adoption.
First, build the hardware before the software. Cities often go after software before laying pipes
— in both senses of the term. Without hardware such as sensors, IoT devices, and reliable connections flowing to form data pipelines, AI becomes a chess grandmaster with no pieces on the board. Data doesn’t fall from a cloud. It’s coming from the sensors that keep you awake and the suspension bridges that tell you when you’re tired.
Consider infrastructure surveillance in Japan. It’s an unassuming but impressive network of sensors that measures bridge stress and water pressure with minimal effort. The result is fewer outages, less money spent avoiding failures, and fewer fiascos.
In India, digital sensing should be a default design feature for all new bridges, water and waste facilities. There is no need to add it as an afterthought. Of course, more sensors means more data, which brings unique concerns such as privacy, ownership, and even cyber vulnerabilities. These aren’t things you should put off, but just a reminder that governance has to move as fast as you write code.
Second, create data-driven feedback loops. Sound governance is about more than just providing services. It’s also responding. Paradoxically, by giving us better ears, AI can also make urban noises more human-like.
Rajkot has now deployed an AI chatbot that handles almost everything, from birth certificates to water bill inquiries. This chatbot is not only your internal form filler, but also your ears. Manage and send feedback, draw attention to repeat complaints, and even prompt departments to be more responsive.
Multiply this over the entire city. A bot on WhatsApp, an NLP engine, reads the noise around citizen complaints and tells us not just how dissatisfied they are, but what they are dissatisfied about.
But there’s a catch. AI can be elitist. While the voices of the digital elite are reflected, the voices of the urban poor are drowned out. This is not a technically flawed procedure. Cities will need to elegantly bridge the analog-digital divide, so paper complaints filed with district offices will eventually be incorporated into the same data programs as tweets and chatbot pings.
This is the nervous system of democracy. And if AI can help cities break down the time barrier of knowing what their citizens know, then it’s not a technology we should deny.
Third, respect the humble virtue of maintenance. Politicians are required to cut ribbons, and bureaucrats are required to maintain roads. Which one do you think gets the news? Maintenance is an overlooked linchpin of urban resilience, and generations of deep-rooted disdain for it have brought us to the point where its neglect is killing us.
Predictive maintenance, one of the more boring features of AI, has the potential to change this. Now, using technology such as computer vision and vibration sensors, authorities can catch the beginnings of corruption. In Japan, the introduction of these construction methods has made it possible to extend the lifespan of bridges. Singapore’s water utility is using AI to ‘see’ things that the naked eye cannot do. It’s kind of a city-wide sixth sense.
India’s local government incentives need to be rewired. Maintenance should not be an after-the-fact, added-on, in-line cost. Rather, they should be budgeted as a whole, fenced in, and tracked individually. All new assets must be digital twinned with a predictive maintenance schedule before launch. This is a kind of contract for the future.
Building an institutional backbone
This does not happen in a vacuum. Adopting AI requires organization. We need real organizations with authority and staying power, not weak structures. A smart city SPV could become a digital innovation hub staffed by both data scientists and urban planners. Seoul’s Digital Policy Bureau runs dozens of AI projects from a single control room. This is a case study to emulate.
But governance structures alone are not enough. We must overturn the opaque castle of purchasing regulations. The power of AI is in repetition, not in fixing bid prices. Cities could experiment with “challenge bidding.” The idea is to ask startups to solve problems in today’s sandbox and pay for results, not promises. It’s faster, fairer, and more likely to grow new ideas than a 100-page request for proposal.
And don’t overlook India’s hidden weapons: digital public infrastructure: Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker. Each city can connect to a national backbone network rather than deploying its own system from scratch, reducing costs while data continues to communicate with other cities. In other words, our country’s digital rail could become the vehicle for urban governance over the next decade.
AI does more than simply materialize and remove urban dysfunction. But with any luck, maybe, just maybe, the administration will be a little less blind, a little sooner, a little more kind to all the people standing in line at City Hall. The problem at issue is a fundamental one. Do we want a city that chases the headlines, or one that quietly does its job very well? A city that fixes leaks before they burst and listens to its citizens without waiting for them to cry is what we should strive for. It’s not science fiction, it’s the future of good government.
